


Anomaly

by tarblacks0ul



Category: Girl's Day (Band), VIXX
Genre: F/M, Romance, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-10 23:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7865275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarblacks0ul/pseuds/tarblacks0ul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was a threshold mankind was never meant to cross.  He knew there was a good chance this was a suicide mission when he took it, but it was the only choice they had. He was a soldier, and his orders were to find her and eliminate her. The scientist who created this reality. Who created him. </p>
<p>He wasn't supposed to save her instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anomaly

He wasn’t supposed to save her.

This was a threshold mankind was never meant to cross… though, to be fair, he wasn’t exactly mankind. Not entirely. But he worked for them. He fought for them. He was supposed to save them.

He had taken this mission, committing an act one must never commit. It wasn’t the killing. He was a soldier. He knew death. He had dealt it when he had to, faced it when he had to. He was unafraid of it, even now. He knew there was a good chance this was a suicide mission when he took it. Interdimensional travel had been an accident, a mistake, but Pandora’s box had been opened nonetheless. And while the known universe had been mapped extensively and uploaded into his brain, this was not _his_ universe. There was no way to map the infinite number of timelines that could spring from one choice made differently, one action taken or not taken. This was a mission based on ifs and maybes, on possibilities and potential.

It was the only choice they had.

 

He first saw her over the gleaming barrel of the phase pistol she had trained to his forehead.

He had seen her before, though not in person. Clad in her NovaCorp uniform, hair fastened in a practical and professional ponytail, hunched over a tableau of human and machine parts, receiving awards for her groundbreaking contributions to the science of war. Beautiful and deadly as the soldiers she created.

She was more petite than he’d imagined, almost fragile with her slender figure and long limbs. Yet her gaze and her stance were shot through with steel, red hair framing her face in a flaming halo, backlit by the sterile wash of light illuminating the lab.

The shadows veiled him where he stood, obscuring him enough from her view that she could not see who he was. What he was.

He stepped forward, into the light.

The pistol wavered. A flicker of something—Shock? Fear?—crossed her face briefly, barely-there and barely noticeable. A normal human probably _wouldn’t_ have noticed. But he did.

“How…?” she gasped.

He stepped closer. Her grip tightened on the pistol, despite the tremor in her hands. “Stop. Don’t come any closer. I will shoot.”

“Your weapon will not stop me,” he said. “Slow me down, perhaps. At its highest setting, it will severely burn and likely disfigure my face. I will be temporarily incapacitated, but the nanites in my system will repair my biological tissue within forty-eight hours. Meanwhile, my backup systems will kick in and I will likely kill you, particularly as you lack advanced combat training, and my algorithms will anticipate your next move.”

“You’re going to kill me anyway,” she said. “Might as well make it fun.”

“I do not believe this would be very much fun for either of us.”

“Who sent you?” she demanded. “You’re not one of mine. I’ve only built a prototype. Did another corporation steal it? That prototype is buggy as hell, and I know just how your systems will fail if that is indeed what you are.”

“I am one of yours,” he said, “but I’m not a prototype.”

“That’s impossible.”

“In this timeline, yes. But not in mine.”

Though she still clutched the pistol firmly in both hands, he saw the turmoil in her eyes, her human brain rapidly trying to wrap itself around the impossible.

Interdimensional travel. _Time travel._

_“How?”_

“There isn’t time to explain. I have a mission to carry out.”

“And what is that mission?”

“I’ve come to kill you.”

 

He’d had a name once. Back when he was human. But since they’d made him, they just called him “N.” 

Even in his timeline, memory-transfer tech was still in prototype. Memories of his time as a human had never been fully erased, simply buried under layers of tech and training. They were easy enough to suppress, but in those quiet times when his systems powered down and his mind was still, memories resurfaced, unbidden, flickering like phantoms before vanishing back into the darkness.

He remembered the moon orbiting the gas giant which itself orbited the dying red sun. He thought he’d been born there. Even with the terraforming, the moon never looked like Earth. Not that he’d seen Earth, not in person. But everyone knew about Earth. Everyone knew about the green trees and yellow sun and vast oceans. Here, there was only the subterranean ocean around which the colony was built. 

The Corporate Wars had raged for decades. The advent of faster-than-light travel had brought access to the universe, rife with possibilities and potential. As humans spread themselves out across the galaxy, the corporations went with them, controlling massive swathes of space and all that it contained. The moon was worth little more than the minerals being mined deep beneath its surface, and his fate lay at the whims of the company who controlled it. The only way to escape that fate was enlistment.

And NovaCorp had made him.

As the corporations grappled for control of the strategically located star system, the rebellion saw their chance. Weakened from fighting each other, it made the corporations ripe for the picking. The rebels were untried and untested, but they had pluck, and more importantly, a fire borne of desperation and the knowledge that they had nothing left to lose. And they almost won, too.

Until NovaCorp unleashed their deadliest weapon.

 

“You won’t kill me,” she said.

“If you are appealing to the human concept of morals, you will fail. I am a soldier. These are my orders. I will not be swayed.”

“Bullshit,” she retorted. It caught him off-guard. He was not prepared for such defiance from a human who, given her role in all this, surely knew how pointless it was to fight him. She could never take him in combat. He was immune to human foibles such as cowardice or conscience. He would see his orders through.

It was just taking a little longer than he had planned.

“If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it by now. Why are you still standing here talking to me? Why not just shoot me in the face with that phase pistol built into your cybernetic hand? Why not snap my neck before I finish this sentence? You can move fast enough for that. Christ, you’re a perfect facsimile of my design—the one I haven’t even been able to build yet.”

“You needed a dying man,” he informed her. “One with enough life for your machines to resurrect him. One who could not ask you to let him die instead.”

“Is that what you asked me there, in your reality?”

He was silent.

“Is that why you’re here to kill me? Because I didn’t kill you?”

“You killed the human I was.”

She shook her head. “No. No, I did not. That’s who’s talking to me now. That’s the man who hasn’t killed me yet.”

 

He was dying.

He couldn’t say when he knew it was over. When he knew the life was slipping from his body as surely as the last rays of red sunlight gave way to the murky twilight. He knew that the phase burns covered most of his body, uniform material seared to flesh and flayed off like the cracked and cratered floor of the tunnels beneath the moon’s surface. He no longer registered the sensation of pain—not because there was none, but because the sheer amount had rendered his body numb to it, perhaps in a last-ditch attempt for a final moment of peace. However, it gave him little comfort to know he fought and died for the very corporation whose clutches he’d enlisted to escape. A slow and certain death from a lifetime of hard labor and hard drinking, or a violent death in combat to preserve the way of life that killed his father but kept the rest of his family alive. He’d thought the latter would at least be quick.

It wasn’t.

He was lying on a cold steel table. Not that he could register the sensation of cold anymore—his brain still had the wherewithal to process what was happening as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He could no longer feel his limbs—what was left of them anyway—or even his own labored breath as he struggled to continue taking each one. _Not yet… not yet…_

His vision blurred and began to grow dark. He tasted the metallic tang of blood. Not long now. The last thing he remembered—the last thing he saw as a human—was a flash of red hair. Red like the rays of the dying sun. Red like the blood warming his lips. Red like the blood of the soldiers he’d killed. Red like the blood his family, and all the other people he’d failed to protect.

 

“Perhaps you fascinate me,” he said. “I had not imagined conversing with my creator before she had created me.”

She shook her head. “You never were going to kill me. Without me, you’d never find them.”

 

He cannot interfere with his own past.

Granted, there were no rules set down for interdimensional travel. There hadn’t been time, as its discovery had been an accident, this mission an experiment. There was no protocol for the possibility of encountering his former self, or anyone his former self knew.

His mission was not about saving his human family. He had known the sacrifice that was necessary to save humankind. They would still die. But at least this time their deaths would mean something.

 

“You can’t change history, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you kill me, the cyborg soldiers will never be made. _You_ will never be made. The corporations won’t win. You’ll create a new timeline, a better timeline.”

“That was my mission, yes.”

“But how do you know that timeline doesn’t already exist?”

“What are you saying?”

“You aren’t with the corporations anymore,” she pointed out. “Why did you change sides? You yourself say you’re not human. You just take orders. So who’s giving you the orders?”

 

When his eyes opened, he was lying on a cold steel table. Again.

“You work for us now,” a male voice said.

The man standing above him wore a simple white coat over civilian clothing. A rebel doctor.

But how would a rebel doctor gain control of a cyborg soldier, designed to be unbeatable, immune to torture or persuasion? His programming would have to be altered. His loyalties redirected. His circuits reconnected.

No rebel doctor would have that knowledge.

Unless this was not the doctor who rewired him…

 

“There’s only one person who could have done what you say they did,” she said.

He shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

Her lips, red like her hair, quirked. “Now who’s talking about the impossible?”

“Future you switched sides,” he said, slowly. “Future you… sent me back to kill _past_ you?”

“Please, give future me more credit than that.”

She was still holding the pistol, though her posture had relaxed considerably. But the tension in her shoulders, her finger hovering at the trigger, assured him she hadn’t totally let down her guard. She was ready to fire at any moment.

“If you’re so sure I won’t kill you, why are you still aiming your pistol at me?”

“A girl can never be too safe.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Should I?”

“No,” he replied.

 

Before the mission, his superiors had uploaded as much information as they could about his target right into his memory banks.

Information about her was sparse, but it was surprising how much he could discern from the digital images that flickered across his field of vision. He’d memorized everything—her voice, her posture, her mannerisms. He felt certain he’d know her instantly when he saw her, even without glimpsing the red hair first. Her name was but an afterthought.

_Dr. Sojin Park._

 

He sensed the intruders before she did.

Perhaps it was his highly sensitive hearing that detected the footfalls in the space station’s corridor, or his biometric scanners that clocked the heat signatures of approaching men. They were not the lab techs whom he’d seen traversing the corridor as he made his way among them, donning a coat both to disguise himself and to cover his tech. No, these men were armed. They were soldiers.

There wasn’t time to run, not that they could, as there was only one way out of the lab, and that way was essentially closed off to them.

“Get behind me,” he said.

Her brows knitted in confusion. “What?”

“Just do it!”

She ducked behind him as the door to the lab slid open. Whoever these men were, they—or the people who sent them—controlled the space station’s computer.

The cyborg still donned his lab coat, throwing the soldiers briefly before they realized what he was. But training superseded shock, and then they were upon him.

Phase fire whirred past his ears as he moved toward the soldiers, taking a few hits to his metal parts in the process. Though the sensation of phase fire on metal was uncomfortable, those parts remained unharmed unlike biological tissue. He made quick work of the first set of soldiers, knocking their military pulse rifles away as effortlessly as though they were toys, then easily incapacitating them from his built-in weaponry or plain hand-to-hand combat. But there were more where they came from, keeping him busy for quite a bit longer. The doctor got in a few lucky hits with her phase pistol, and at some point in the melee, managed to seize a fallen soldier’s pulse rifle. 

“You have combat training?” the cyborg asked.

“I can use a gun.”

“Good enough. We need to leave.”

The two of them picked their way around their fallen assailants and entered the corridor. By now security had wrested control of the space station’s systems back from their attackers, and emergency alarms blared throughout. More soldiers were racing down the corridor toward them, and opened fire. The doctor quickly covered them by firing off two phase pistols, one in each hand. It bought them time to duck behind a post while phase fire glanced off the metal. The space was tiny, forcing her to press herself flush against him. He became privy to a detail that was never included in his mental database—the smell of her hair, like soap and strawberries.

It was quite pleasant.

Her fingers spayed against the metal plate covering one side of his chest, the other hand gripping his very human bicep. Her breath created a formed a small cloud of fog in the metal sheet covering his shoulder. Though she was of above-average height, he was still considerably taller.

“Can you pilot a shuttle?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Then go. I’ll cover you.”

“Should you not go first? You’re the more valuable of the two of us.”

Her face tilted up to meet his gaze. “We’ll go together, then.”

They emerged, phase pistols blazing—the two she held and the one built into his hand—before racing down the corridor in a rain of phase fire.

 

He’d never seen the boss, the woman who led their resistance cell. They kept her hidden away, too valuable to risk exposure. She remained hidden away in a lab, one he’d never seen, but surely been in, before being repaired and returned to sickbay. He’d never questioned this mysterious leader. Her orders all came to him through secondhand sources. It was his place to follow orders, not question them.  

But suddenly, when he got back— _if_ he got back—he burned to see her. To know her. To face the woman he’d traveled to another dimension to kill, but ended up saving.

He had to know _why._ Why she would order him to kill her past self. How she could know what would end up happening, if she even knew at all.

He’d never cared about the _why_ of orders before. They were just orders. He was just a soldier.

Wasn’t he?

 

“Those men weren’t Resistance.”

Her voice broke the relative quiet of the shuttle’s interior—only the hums and beeps of the small vehicle’s systems could be heard. Good. The astroid belt near the space station served not only to obscure it from curious scans, but also as an excellent source of subterfuge for an escaping shuttle. They had only to hide out within a natural cave of one particularly large asteroid, which hopefully blocked the shuttle’s signature from scans.

“Those were company men. One of the militias hired by the companies to do their dirty work.” Wouldn’t be the first time.

“Is this how it happens?” she asked. “They stole my prototype? I go on the run and join the Resistance?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not? To preserve the integrity of the timeline? Because that timeline’s already been shot to hell. The point might be kind of moot now.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “We know very little now about how this works.”

“But you risked it to save me.”

“I risked it to save us all.”

“Let’s not split hairs here.”

A sensation came over him, unexpected and fleeting, much like the memories of his human life. It was enough to quirk the corner of his mouth up as he regarded her before him, eyes still alight with defiance even in the pallid glow of the shuttle’s internal lights.

It rattled him.

“There’s a safe house in the Altair System. We should arrive in a few days even without FTL,” he said. “We’ll set a course once they’re gone.”

“A rebel safe house?”

“Yes, my systems confirm that there are settlers there in this timeline. Of course, there is no official record of the safe house, but it was present in my timeline, so it is likely to be present here as well.”

“Did future me tell you this?”

“I have never dealt directly with future you, if she is indeed our leader. This is our first meeting.”

“This implies another.”

“If there is, I don’t know it yet.”

“Fate, perhaps?”

“There is no such thing as fate.”

“They also say there’s no such thing as time travel.”

“Well, this may not be time travel, per se,” he said. “I’ve simply found a way to cross dimensions into another timeline.”

“So this could all be for nothing?”

“It could,” he said, “or it could change everything.”

“What must it be like there?” she murmured. “That you would risk this much to change it?”

He said nothing. For a few beats, they heard nothing but the white noise of the shuttle. His own alerts remained silent. This was encouraging. They might have lost their pursuers.

“How do you go back?” she asked.

“They call me back.”

“You can communicate with them?”

“Not exactly. They’ve programmed a tether in me, so to speak. Were I human, they would give me a device. This is part of the reason I was sent here—they’re still uncertain if a human would survive the journey.”

“So how can they know if you completed the mission? Can you contact them through the tether?”

“I cannot. They use the tether to monitor my systems, and they’ll call me back once my signature begins to deteriorate.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

He took a moment to formulate his words. “The universe is not a sentient being, we both know, but in a manner of speaking, it wants to preserve order. It knows I do not belong in this timeline, and will seek to eliminate the anomaly. My time here is limited.”

“What happens if you stay too long?”

“I don’t know. I will cease to exist, perhaps.”

“But what about the other you? The you that’s here….” _The you that’s still human._

“He is unaffected by my presence here, I assume. As long as we don’t meet.”

“What happens if you meet?”

“I don’t know,” the cyborg confessed, “but I don’t think it’s wise to find out.”

 

It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder if the future he returned to would be changed. If the events he’d set into motion in the past would start a ripple effect that might leave him stranded in time. Would she still be leading a Resistance cell when he returned? Would he still be what he was?

It went against logic to believe that he, a single person, could have a significant effect on events so much bigger than himself. It seemed impossible that the fate of a woman and a cyborg would manipulate the rise and fall of entire corporations. Of the known universe.

He supposed he’d find out soon enough.

 

He could feel it when they called him back. A spark, a warning tingle. It was hard to explain, because it was not a sensation his systems knew how to read. It was more of a hunch, almost like what humans called intuition, but with tactile sensation rather than emotion.

The had docked at the Altair space station, preparing to exit the shuttle. She fussed over how to hide his identity should anyone see him.

“The lab coat covers a lot. If I could find something to use as a hood….”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

Realization dawned over her face. “They’re calling you back.”

He need not reply; she read his answer in his eyes. Abandoning her former task, she walked over to him.

“So what happens?” she asked. “Do you just… disappear?”

“It will probably appear that way to you, yes. There may be a flash of light, as it takes a great deal of energy to cross dimensions.”

“But I’ll see you again, right?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

He felt it again, more urgently this time, a sharp and visceral tug that briefly blurred his vision before her face slid back into focus. For a moment he was overcome by a powerful sensation, a desire to etch her features into his memory. It was, of course ridiculous—he’d already had images of her sent directly into his memory banks. He could recognize her face if he saw it again. Yet somehow, it felt important to remember her here, now. Like this. 

“I could disappear any minute now,” he said.

Impulsively, she stepped forward, reaching up to rest her hand at the side of his face. Her palm contacted skin; fingertips skimming over his hairline and the metal plate that obscured a small portion of skull. It was an odd gesture, seemingly meaningless, yet every part of the movement felt heavy with significance.

“I’m going to wake up and this will all feel like some weird fever dream, won’t it?”

Her gaze caught his and held it; he had no urge to resist. “You have to go.”

“I know.” 

Yet they stood there, immobile, as the seconds stretched out, as he catalogued as much of this moment as he could into his memory. Somehow, he felt that as impeccable as his data storage systems were, they could never do it justice.

His vision flickered and blurred, and then he was gone.

 

He sees her now for the first time—or more accurately, the second time. Years ago for her, so recently for him.

She’s a little rougher around the edges now—out of her NovaCorp uniform and donning civilian clothing, her hair longer and less impeccably styled, her features carrying the weight of the years that had passed and all she had seen. Yet she is still as beautiful as he remembers her, vibrant and burning bright as her red hair (apparently, the Resistance had no trouble obtaining hair dye).

Recognition dawns across her dark eyes, still intense, still able, somehow, to penetrate as deeply as the long-range vision programmed into his systems.

He doesn’t speak to her, nor she to him. He steps forward. Holds out a hand. So does she. Their fingers entwine, cool metal against warm flesh. He cannot feel the softness of her skin, but he can sense it.

“You didn’t disappear,” she says at last, hint of a smile quirking her lips.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me.”

 


End file.
